Short Fuse: The Baader Meinhof Gang as Action Film

There are some things the German Red Army
Faction -- the RAF, or Baader Meinhof Gang -- had in common with ultra-militant
elements of the American New Left, as I knew and participated in it in the '60s
and '70s. As presented in German director's Uli Edel's,
"The Baader
Meinhof Complex", they smoked incessantly, as if Che had
written: "Let me say, at the risk of being ridiculous, that the true task
of a revolutionary is to assimilate tar and nicotine." Or Mao: "Revolution
is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery,
yet reeks hugely of cigarettes."

Baader Meinhof gang members curse a lot, as we
did, though, at least in translation, they lack for colorful expressions, such
as "Far Fucking Out!" which were springing out of all corners of the
American counter-culture, political or not. These Germans settle for the routine
expletive, "Scheiss!" Can a movement so dull in expletives be truly
inventive -- except by being more murderous?

Also, though the Germans, as depicted in this
film, argue a lot, they barely quote Marx, Engels, Lenin (let's skip Stalin) or
Mao, much less Debray, Ho, Giap, Gramsci, or Marcuse. We, on the other hand,
for a supposedly moronically anti-intellectual bunch of Americans, did refer
often to such sources. We needed massive ideological backup for the lengths to
which our opposition, as Americans being drafted to fight the War in Vietnam,
was driving us.

The far fucking out Germans in this film,
however, mostly just raise their voices and scream. They don't seem to have
emerged from a student movement rich in argumentation, nor to have discovered,
gradually, painfully, demonstration by demonstration, as we did, that talk
didn't slow the bombing, agent oranging, or napalming of Vietnam, nor soften
the impact on our skulls of police clubs. The RAF appears to have sprung fully
formed out of the psychotic German mix of dogmatism and violence -- plus one
key element that brought it all to boil: the hatred of their children toward
the generation that had brought the Nazis to power. When Jerry Rubin said,
"Kill everyone over thirty," it was at least arguably tongue in
cheek. The RAF had no cheeks.

"The Baader
Meinhof Complex," is not a film about how an initially
idealistic, anti-war, mass movement can spawn and in the end be distorted and
defined by whacked out terrorists, who thrive in the zone where psychosis and
politics merge. Such a movie would be useful to have, though not so easy to
make. Instead Edel has opted for an action flick, and, by the standards of that
genre, has succeeded. The history of the day stands behind his portrayals of
beatings, bombings, shootings, assassinations, suicides, and during relative
lulls, mere slugfests.

It's worth noting, as a footnote to the film,
that the three countries where true terrorist networks took hold during that
era were Germany, Italy, and Japan. These were the Axis Powers of World War II.
The American left came close to the same hideous extremes, but drew back in
time.

Still, as I left the theater, I heard one guy
singing, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind
blows." Make of it what you will, we introduced ourselves, and shook
hands.